A few weeks ago, I made flowers - Bachelor Buttons – out of patterned paper.  They were fun and fairly easy.  While I had the folding idea fresh in my mind, I tried it on different materials.  Can you tell what I used this time?  Guess.

(This is a re-creation…the first one I experimented with was white, but I think this would work as well for the colors I used, although the finished color might differ slightly!)

Anyway, it had been sitting here, buried on my desk, until my cleaning uncovered it.  (This is what happens when I start to clean…I get distracted!)  I hate to just toss those little "trial and error" pieces, but it had no purpose and trying to find it a home can cause serious delay in my schedule.  But then I spied my Glimmer Mist sitting up on my shelf, and a recent trip to the Carlsbad flower fields was fresh on my mind and I thought, "Hmmm…if I spray it with color and don't like it, I can justify tossing it."  Guess what?  I kind of liked it.  I played with it a lot and was happy with the end result.  So I kept it…and kept playing with it.  So much for cleaning!  And on to finding a suitable background for my flower.

I have been taught to have great respect for books.  I love books, not only for their content, but for their visual appeal…no, I'm not talking about picture books, even though those are wonderful as well.  As a scrapbooker, I love to play with paper.   One of the projects I have admired from afar is using die cuts from dictionaries.  So, for that purpose I acquired a 2-volume (circa 1927) dictionary.  The thing I liked about it was all the drawings in it.  Nothing was printed in color, which I think is very cool.  However, I have had the set for a year or more and haven't been able to bring myself to defile it…okay, that may be a harsh word for what I was wanting to do.  I finally, yesterday, found better words for what I was trying to accomplish…re-purpose and recycle! 

Being GREEN is so PC that if I attach this label to my project, I should be safe, as opposed to being labeled as "book destroyer" or "book defacer".  The binding on the book is getting brittle and the pages will get that way eventually as well.  I had to tell myself "Just do it!" and I started spraying some Glimmer Mist on an opened page and VOILA!  The dirty deed is done, the set is ruined for any intellectual purposes as it is now incomplete and I suddenly have thousands of dictionary pages, ripe for the creative picking!

I have been asked to demonstrate scrapbooking/card-making/paper arts projects at the Del Mar Fair…what do you think about teaching how to make this flower as one of the demos?  As for now, I'd better get back to cleaning.  Who knows what new treasure I will uncover!